Hannah Cheramy

Julie Matthews lives in a constant in-between space, no longer a child but not yet an adult. How did you approach embodying that emotional limbo, especially in a world as extreme and unforgiving as the town in FROM? 

That is a great way to explain it. Julie is a chronic in-betweener.  In between child and an adult; in between colony house and town; in between being trusted with her parents’ secrets and being hidden from the horrors of the town; in between discovering her own ability as a story walker and being advised by everyone around her to stay away; she is constantly being torn from both sides. I think that this chaos actually helps me play Julie. Nobody wants to play a cut and dry character, especially as a female actress when we are finally getting to explore the world of multifaceted, complex characters; and Julie is exactly that. You root for her one day, and then next she makes a decision that reminds you she’s only 16 and doesn’t have it all figured out yet. I love playing with the chaos and confusion of nearly every aspect of her life.

Over the course of the series, Julie is deeply shaped by trauma, panic attacks, and survivor’s guilt. What was the most challenging aspect of portraying prolonged fear and its psychological toll on someone so young? 

I think the most challenging aspect comes into play when I do scenes that are actually more lighthearted. I can cry and scream all day, but to then perform a scene where the tone appears to do a 180, while still trying to keep Julie’s trauma and anxieties in the back of my brain at all times, is a very fine line to balance. You don’t want to play it too happily, because we still need to be cognizant of where they are, but then you can’t play every scene on a sombre note, or else why would anyone choose to continue living in this town if there aren’t these brief moments of happiness?

FROM uses horror as a way to explore adolescence under extreme circumstances. What do you think the show reveals about how fear can accelerate emotional maturity in unsettling ways? 

That’s a great question, and one that I’ve had to do some deep prep to understand myself. The general understanding is that fear and trauma make adolescents grow up faster, but in From it makes them grow up, almost, wrong. From creates a world where there is no room for the adolescent characters to make any mistakes, one of the fundamental aspects of youth, and this leads Julie and Ethan to “mature” in ways that their young minds can’t handle. For Ethan we can see this in his almost apathetic regard for the macabre, while Julie we can see her crack and break more than a healthy, developing person should; her mental state is so broken she cannot process emotion properly; under-reacting and shutting down in situations of extreme trauma, and experiencing panic attacks and mental turmoil at moments that seem to be not as intense as other situations that she’s encountered.

Season four is highly anticipated. Without giving anything away, how did returning to Julie this season feel compared to earlier seasons, and how has your relationship with the character evolved? 

I came into this season with one goal in mind: I want to story walk eeeeverywhere this year. Because I started this season knowing that the last season ended how it did, I came in guns blazing, ready to take whatever John Griffin threw at me.

My relationship with Julie has evolved tremendously over the years. Now that I’ve been doing the show for 5 years, I know Julie inside out, and I trust myself and my body to get into character and move and speak with honesty, just as Julie would.

FROM was created by producers of Lost and has a strong mystery-driven narrative. As an actor, how do you balance emotional truth with a story where so much is intentionally unknown? 

It’s both so frustrating and so helpful all at once. Just as a fan of the show, I want to know what is going on, but as an actor, it allows me to give a more honest performance if I am just as in the dark as Julie is. If I ever get confused while trying to keep track of all the plot lines and what I, as Julie, know and don’t know, I have to start only reading the scenes that Julie is in for a while, because Julie wouldn’t have any idea what’s happening, and I don’t want it to read as if she somehow does.

You began acting at a very young age and storytelling seems to have always been part of your life. When you look back, what drew you so strongly to performance in the first place? 

I don’t think I can pinpoint something that is so innate within me; I mean, my family members tell stories of me posing for cameras in my first few weeks of life. A more general draw I had would be any time I got to see a young girl (mostly on the Disney channel, as I was young at the time I started), getting to sing, dance and act all at once on her own show named after her; that was the dream.

Your breakout role in The Hollow Child required a great deal of restraint and control. How did that early experience shape your understanding of subtlety and emotional grounding as an actor? 

Gosh, it’s hard to remember that far back now. I remember that project was the first time I realized that most little kids would get scared of the things that I was seeing/doing. I killed multiple people in that film; I had to wear full face prosthetics; it was a lot! But I was just so game for anything that I didn’t even notice that things were scary. When working with child actors, you want to protect them from as many of the horrors as you can, but when the child is the one doing the killing, it’s hard to avoid it. That project was a pretty defining “I was born for this” moment for me.

During Van Helsing, you first felt the scale of audience engagement with your work. How did that moment change your awareness of your impact as a performer? 

I think that Van Helsing really opened my eyes up to what it’s like to have a large amount of people both watch and enjoy your work. After filming season one, and going back to into season two I remember really thinking to myself “Okay Hannah, this is your opportunity to show these people you can play more than just the young daughter in this show, you can play the manipulative monster as well, you can do this physical action simultaneous to staying grounded in your performance in the scene”. It was the first time I began to really think like a professional performer.

Your performances are often described as emotionally intelligent and restrained. How do you personally define a truthful performance, especially within genres like horror? 

I define a truthful performance as “how would an actual human being respond if they were placed in the same situation,” and the answer usually is by peeing their pants and crying heavily. I can’t exactly portray the former on television, so I stick to the latter. Jokes aside, I think that by just allowing my body to feel and move, in any way that it sees fit when I fully immerse myself in a scene, is all the truth I can give. If I think too hard about how something is going to look on camera, then how am I supposed to perform with any honesty?

Outside of acting, you enjoy quieter, creative hobbies and are vocal about social justice issues. How do those personal values and practices influence the kinds of stories you want to tell going forward? 

My values and beliefs shape everything about my life. It shapes the stories that I’m drawn to; it shapes my perception of how a story is written; and it guides me to use my better judgment when I read scripts that I know I could not truthfully play, given my demographic, that would be better suited for another actor.